The wars of the future were mostly bloodless and mostly painless. With energy weapons that cauterised instantly, only the shock of loss and the pain of another human’s death persisted. And it was always painful to see a soldier suddenly missing an arm, a leg, too stunned to realise their loss or, worse, with a perfect hole through their stomach, barely aware they had been hit, not bleeding but with laboured breathing, faltering internal processes, fading, slipping into death. It might take them minutes, even hours to die this unnatural death, but it was inevitable; unpreventable in the heat of battle. And so, if fearful insanity did not first overtake them, the soldiers might record a frantic farewell to their loved ones on their helmet-mics, rarely anything more.

It’s hard to imagine the horrors of mustard gas in the 1910s, all those years ago. It seemed that since long before then mankind had been devising new ways to kill each other. Every now and then throughout the sordid history of war someone would invent a defensive measure; a new type of armour, a gas mask, a nuclear bunker. But this would only slow the mounting death-tolls until a bigger gun, a better bullet, was invented. Now he had the handheld laser rifles, and there was something uniquely terrible about their clean ineffeciency. They were bloodless, which made them, falsely, seem humane, and neither of those adjectives have any place in war. War should be bloody and it should be inhumane. Soldiers shouldn’t die in painless delirium: they should scream and writhe in the dirt, and when the people back home see the images on their screens, they should squirm and say “no, that’s not what I want for my children.”

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I don’t know where this came from and since I currently have little to no interest in writing either science fiction or war fiction, I doubt it will go any further. Still, I kind of like it.